Reader Tips

Reader Tips 31 Comments

What do you get when you take a great song with melody and lyrics that perfectly complement each other, add an elegantly simple instrumental arrangement, and hand the mic to a vocalist with a masterful sense of phrasing? A timeless, enduring classic: Co-written by vocalist Ben E. King and the songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller (“Jailhouse Rock”, “On Broadway”, “Spanish Harlem” and many others), here’s King’s 1961 hit Stand By Me.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.

31 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. A happy, heartwarming story: Roommates find $40,000 in used couch, return money to widow.
    “It’s not our money,” said (Reese) Werkhoven. “We didn’t have any right to it.”
    Exactly. Hope she runs for public office someday..

  2. “The Ontario provincial election race is tightening, with a 7-point gap separating first place from third among decided voters, according to a new Ipsos Reid poll..”

  8. CBC gets “sudden concern with the welfare of soldiers” syndrome in order to bash Harper.
    But I agree: vets need more cash, so let’s divert bucket loads to them from the CBC’s yearly budget.

  10. “Former NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg rips liberal intolerance…”.
    That is the pot calling the kettle black. Didn’t he want to ban everything in sight that he did not agree with?

  13. GREAT music, EBD! (as well as most of the songs on the right side of the YouTube page..) Thanks.

  15. A real conservative government would be seeking to reform the CBC in line with these realities: at a minimum, to get it off public subsidy and onto a viewer-pay model; beyond that, to break it up into a constellation of specialty channels; in time to migrate out of conventional broadcasting altogether, following the rest of the industry as it moves online.
    Or if your tastes run to something more red-meat, privatize it, shut it down, whatever. That is what a real conservative government would have done. But as this is not a real conservative government, it has instead simply left the CBC as it is, adrift, purposeless, yet still consuming $1-billion of scarce public funds every year. It does so, for all its pretensions of concern for the taxpayer, because the CBC is more useful to it in its present state: not as a problem to be fixed, but as a platform on which to raise funds, a scapegoat for the party’s failures, a diversion for the base’s wrath.
    http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/05/30/andrew-coyne-real-conservatives-would-have-scrapped-or-reformed-the-cbc-the-tories-just-profit-from-it/

  16. I AM, Joe Molnar, I emailed HUDAK a winning formula for this Ontario election…
    1.Put a FREEZE on Casinos in Ontario as a SLUSH FUND for Municipal Governance, Casinos are a CURSE ON GAMBLING ADDICTED SENIORS…. wearing worn out sneakers, pushing WALKERS AND CARRYING OXYGEN TANKS AT THE SLOTS!!
    2.Break the offshore beer conglomerates (like COORS) hold on BEER sales ( Unionozed, LCBO ) in Ontario and let MOM & POP Variety Store owners sell BEER & WINE to the Public as they do in Quebec & Newfoundland!
    A
    BOLD MOVE AND A VOTE GETTER FOR SURE, ESPECIALLY IN THE MAJOR CENTRES LIKE TORONTO.
    3.Re-energize Ontario’s Harness Horse (STANDARDBRED) World class Yearling Market BY either getting the OLG to hell out of the way or forcing the OLG to re-instate the former funding formula to the harness Horse Racing Industry.
    It’s not too late for Hudak to find or re-discover his party’s GONADS and LEAD!

  17. Doesn’t death by a thousand cuts force the CBC to come to the same conclusion that they can only survive as a media outlet if they actually let market forces impact their operations.
    Prefer to look at it as the CBC has the option to sink (refusing to manage their operations) or swim ( take charge of operations without govt handout)

  18. The Memorial to the Victims of Communism will serve as a public reminder of the millions of victims of Communism, and will bring the suffering of these victims into the public’s consciousness.
    Memorials are essential parts of our national landscape: they serve as important markers for events and people that make up the diverse fabric of our nation. In Canada, over 8 million people trace their roots to countries that suffered under Communism. Since the beginning of the first Communist regime in 1917, immigrants from Communist countries have flocked to Canada in search of freedom and safety.
    http://www.tributetoliberty.ca/content/victims-communism

  19. “‘Poisonous ideology’: Stephen Harper launches full-throated attack on communism at Toronto fundraiser”
    “Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched into a full-throated attack on the evils of communism at a fundraiser on Friday for a monument to its victims.
    In a lengthy key-note speech to the dinner, Harper took aim at Russian President Vladimir Putin and past adherents to communism.
    “During the 20th century, communism’s poisonous ideology and ruthless practices slowly bled into countries around the world, on almost every continent,” Harper said.
    “The result was catastrophic. More than 100 million souls were lost — an almost incomprehensible number.””
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/05/30/poisonous-ideology-stephen-harper-launches-full-throated-attack-on-communism-at-toronto-fundraiser/

  20. Ontario Liberal Wynne’s socialism/bolshevism.
    …-
    “The long, slow decline of the nation’s industrial heartland”
    “With a pivotal election fast approaching, The Globe and Mail’s Adam Radwanski travels to the Achilles’ heel of Ontario, the southwest. Once the nation’s industrial heartland, it is in an economic tailspin and battling to find a new game plan that will keep its children at home – and reinvent a vital region.”
    “I was raised in Kitchener and spent summers playing in vacant lots, balancing on rusted railway tracks and throwing rocks at abandoned factories. The three days I spent photographing the ghosts of Ontario’s manufacturing heyday gave me a chance to reflect on my hometown. I shot in black and white to express the nostalgia that came to me when I saw places like the shuttered GM plant in Windsor and the streets of London and Kitchener. I wanted to offer the viewer a small part of the emotions felt by someone who grew up in these places. I also worked to make a connection with the next generation growing up in struggling industry towns. These are the kids who were raised on blue-collar incomes but will likely never experience a day of work on an assembly line.
    — Ian Willms”
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/after-the-gold-rush/article18923563/
    …-
    “Caracas Goes Thirsty as Taps Run Dry and Bottles Vanish”
    “Residents of the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, who already struggle to find toilet paper and deodorant, are facing a new shortage — drinking water.”
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-30/caracas-residents-go-thirsty-as-taps-run-dry-and-bottles-vanish.html

  21. And the biggest victims of the Soviet Union were its own people.
    We’re now 23 years since its collapse and are still blaming the victims.
    Some, like Russia, have done well, accumulating $486 billion in reserves.
    Others, like Ukraine with zero reserves, used some of the $17 billion it received from the International Monetary Fund to pay a $786 million of the $3.5 billion it owes to Russia.
    So, could somebody please explain how it’s Putin’s fault that Ukraine has become a deadbeat nation?
    http://www.bbc.com/news/business-27641419
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-29/invesco-bolts-from-kiev-to-safety-of-putin-s-debt-russia-credit.html
    Better yet, fans of the former breadbasket of Europe which has become a basket case close to a failed state … buck up guys, Ukraine needs your money.

  27. Handy ACLU guide details various US Border Patrol abuses and how to deal with the BP thugs with as little risk of injury or death as possible.

  29. No more pigsh*t/stinking 750 jobs in TO.
    Organic pork is the stink of the future.
    …-
    “End of a chapter in Hogtown history after Toronto’s last pig plant shuts its doors”
    “Toronto’s Hogtown nickname was slapped on the city long ago by people who loved to hate the place.
    Torontonians happily adopted the handle. They knew where their pork – and the slaughterhouse smells – came from.
    An 1898 story in The Globe put it this way: “The remark originally had no relation at all to our friend the hog, but was merely intended to convey an impression that the citizens of Toronto were porcine in their tendencies and had their fore feet in anything that was worth having. … This is Hogtown and growing more hoggy all the time. Toronto bacon is chasing Chicago pork and short ribs all around the ring. In a few more rounds we shall reach its solar plexus.”
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/the-end-of-hogtown-torontos-last-pig-plant-shuts-its-doors/article18932864/

  30. Our Enemy, the State.
    O’narcissist hoist by its own petard.
    “The government he has studiously tried to grow, manage and change has become his own personal nemesis.”
    …-
    “Obama defeated by his own bureaucracy”
    “When Barack Obama was a newbie president, there was no shortage of ambition or lack of confidence in the government he was about to lead. Government should be seen as a force for good, not evil. Sure, he told us, it needed to be “smarter and better,” but that could—and would—happen under his watch.
    Never mind that Bill Clinton spent years “reinventing government” with mixed success. Or that only 2% of the American public believes that government can be trusted to do the right thing all the time. President Obama was convinced he could change all that with programs that would deliver for America—such as health care reform—and the public would be grateful.
    Instead, the President is living his own version of “Alice Through the Looking Glass”: staring down a rabbit hole of government bureaucracy and inefficiency. The government he has studiously tried to grow, manage and change has become his own personal nemesis.”
    http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/30/opinion/borger-obama-defeated-by-bureaucracy/

  31. Thanks for that song. It brings back memories of one of the most wonderful, and entirely unexpected, performances I ever saw.
    In the old Penny Lane building in downtown Calgary, now demolished and replaced, there was an Irish-style pub that for several seasons in the late 90’s had open-mike afternoons on Saturdays, hoisted and compered by a local Irish musician named (surprisingly) Paddy. One of my friends had been a beer-hall performer in South Africa as a younger man, and he began turning up with his twelve-string and doing brief sets. He got on good terms with Paddy and became co-host; the two of them would often act as makeshift band for anybody who wanted to take the mike for a song. I’d regularly come out and keep them company.
    One afternoon there were a couple of tables full of young British soldiers in the crowd. Such Tommies are a regular feature of the bar scene in Calgary; the British Army trains at Suffield, and when they’ve had their fill of the bars in Medicine Hat they’ll come into the big city to kick up their heels a bit. One of them came up, I suspect on a dare, and asked if the boys could play “Stand By Me”. They both knew it well, and the soldier said he’d learned it from when it was used in a Levi’s commercial in England, and he thought he’d like to give it a go.
    So Paddy with his fiddle, my friend on guitar, and this English soldier launched into “Stand By Me”, without an instant of preparation or rehearsal or planning; and it was stunningly, jaw-droppingly beautiful. The guy could really sing, and Paddy improvised a wonderful series of violin figures and fills, and the whole thing went smoothly and perfectly to an effortless finale. The crowd went nuts, and young Tommy was the hero of the hour to his mates. I’ve never seen something so wonderful just materialise out of the air like that, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

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